


Six Crossings

by Dolorosa



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 16:37:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18450464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolorosa/pseuds/Dolorosa
Summary: Five times Persephone was transformed by the seasons, and one time she transformed the season instead.





	Six Crossings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Meilan_Firaga](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meilan_Firaga/gifts).



αʹ

She stepped out into the sunshine. Six months had passed since she had felt the warmth of new, living earth under her feet, and she kicked off her shoes — twisted, coiling black sandals, worn as meagre protection against the icy cold down below — and danced across the expanse of growth, caring little for stones or thorns or sharp twigs underfoot. She knew her feet would get dirty, and she welcomed the dirt for the sign of life that it was.

The spring sun was soft on her face, and she could smell flowers — and the faintest hint of the sea — in the air. All around her the world was alive with growing things, the boughs of the trees heavy with blossoms, beans running up trellises, the shoots of garlic plants stretching up towards the sky. The land sloped gently upwards, rising in terraced steps, each filled with grape vines, or olive trees, or figs, overflowing with future promise of harvest. But that was for later. Now was the time for the clear, bright newness of spring.

She reached out a hand, curiously, wondering if, after all her time below in the dark, she still had the same power inside her. Her wondering was answered almost immediately: a pair of white lilies bloomed in her open hands. These were joined by irises, crocuses, tiny, purple violets, and dusky pink roses, tumbling in a tangle from her fingertips, coiling down towards the ground, and spreading like a carpet in waves around her. And, like an afterthought, there were larkspur flowers, twisting around her bare arms, and growing upwards towards the sweep of her hair. She took a step forward, and flowers sprang up in the indentation her bare foot had left in the earth. This was no cultivated field of carefully delimited plants — this was growth in wild abandon, bursting forth like a victory over a long, bitter winter. The sea of flowers was spreading up the terraced hillside, a riot of colour almost beyond the control of its creator, who was marvelling at the roses encircling her ankles, caring little that their thorns scratched her skin.

She pulled her hair free of the pins keeping it coiled tightly, tied her skirts above the knee to give herself freedom of movement, and continued forwards and upwards, trailing flowers from her heedless hands.

β͵

As always, she didn't know how she knew it was time for her descent, her return. It was like an invisible force, pulling her back imperceptibly. It was not as if she kept track of her days on the surface — and indeed to do so would be absurd. Spring and summer lasted as long as they lasted, and the exact number of days shifted each year. It was a mistake to think that every turn of the seasons was the same. All she knew was that this year, this time, her spring sojourn was at an end. She descended.

It was a matter of minutes for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Lingering spots of sunlight pressed against her eyelids, as she took stock of her surroundings, marvelling at that brief moment of disorientation before she came back to herself. She breathed out her last breath of air she'd been carrying from the living world above, and walked onwards into the cold and darkness.

Everything was dry, and quiet, and still. The loudness of her footsteps was momentarily unnerving, echoing in the dark. She had been wearing a little crown of flowers, and had twined plaited blades of grass around her wrists, and she could feel these withering as she walked. The fruit in her hands — figs, peaches, and some early apples — was losing its colour, shrivelling in on itself. As she walked on, hung about with all these symbols of decay, a figure detached itself from the shadows, steady and solid and implacable as death.

She drew herself into her husband's embrace.

He took her wrists, and the rotting fruit fell from her hands as she clung to him, her fingers digging into his skin. She felt herself uncoiling, shedding her sunlit skin, reverting back to something darker and sharper. His hands left tracks of ice across her bare neck, and she felt their chill even through her light summer clothes. She detangled the flower crown — its contents now dry and brittle — from her hair, and reached up to pull her husband's face to hers, welcoming his kiss, and the resulting ice in her blood. They clung to one another in the shadows.

γ͵

Spring was late, this time around, but it came eventually, and she rose with it, making her way through the dappled light. She had emerged at the edge of a forest, comprised mainly of ash trees, interspersed with almonds and sweet chestnuts, and she felt their flowers swell as she brushed past. She reached out a hand to twine it briefly through the twists of ivy strangling one ancient tree, before turning and walking beyond the forest's edge.

The forest was bordered by an apple orchard, which was alive with activity. People moved between the trees, clearing the ground, and bees hummed as they buzzed among the blossoms. A knot of the workers had downed tools for the noontime break, and were passing around earthenware cups of cool water, shielding their eyes against the sun's increasing brightness. They did not see the figure, paused at the border between field and forest. Idly she twisted a stray ivy leaf between her fingers, contemplating the path ahead, before deciding that this year, she wanted to begin her spring among people, beside the living.

She walked unseen through the throng of orchard workers, trailing a riotous rainbow of flowers in her wake. The earth woke and danced beneath her feet, and she took the time to pause beside each apple tree, resting her hand on its trunk, reinforcing its impulse towards growth, and birth, and renewal. The heady scent of the apple blossoms hovered in the air, and the flowers scattered a shower of petals as she passed underneath. The bees were drawn to her, and hummed around her head in a hazy crown, the sweetness of their hive briefly forgotten. But for the orchard's human inhabitants, she was as insubstantial as a shadow. She had ways of going about undetected, and if any of the workers in the orchard felt her presence, they would have dismissed it as a slight stirring of the air — the first breath of spring.

δ͵

Her descent this time felt abrupt, as if she were tumbling downwards, rushing violently along the path that would return her to her husband's realm. She had lingered aboveground until the last light of the summer sun slipped below the horizon, rosy and peach-coloured in the twilit sea. And then, carrying that warmth and light within her, she turned back, and inwards.

The shock of the cold was like a slap, like a twist of the heart. She could feel the summer leeching out of her as the chill settled in her bones, and stood up straighter, leaving behind her springtime impulse to dance and leap. Her husband, as always, sensed her presence, emerging from the shadows like a piece of liquid darkness. His kiss on her brow was like a question, or perhaps a reminder, for she felt herself shifting back into what she was in the winter months — icy, unknowable, regal. She let him take her arm, and lead her through the dry, still roads that lay like spider web across his lifeless domain. The bouquet of asphodel she carried wilted at his touch.

As they made their way among the grey throngs of dead souls that drifted about those lands, the murmur of those spirits — recounting their deeds, raking over old injustices, seeking out former companions and family members — rose over them like a wave. Every so often a solitary shade would break free of the crowd, their stories swelling out from the teeming mass, their voices registering over the dull susurrus for a moment before being subsumed once more. Her touch was bird-light as she slid her fingers down her husband's arm to take his hand, and she revelled in his reaction — still that moment of shock and unsteadiness, after so many springs and winters. And then, he recovered, and was himself again, all stillness, and cold, and implacability. His hand in hers was like stone, unmoving.

ε͵

The heat hit her like a wave as she broke through into the sunshine. Over the years, the seasons had changed and shifted. Spring's warmth came earlier, and summer's baking heat and ripeness lasted longer. And spring's arrival was more abrupt, a sudden shocking increase in temperature. For many years now, she had found herself spending proportionally longer aboveground, her months down below with her husband curtailed. The turn of the seasons tended to blur after a while, but that had not prevented her from noticing these changes.

She had emerged this time not in the wildness of a forest, nor the cultivated promise of a farm or orchard, but rather a small patch of greenery — a kitchen garden, framed with crocuses and irises — in the midst of a sprawling city. These oases of growth, scattered like jewels among the concrete and asphalt and steel, were still her domain, and she tended to spend her springs and summers moving between them, inhaling their scents of herbs and flowers, running her hands through the blades of grass. And when she wanted to lose herself, she walked among the people, brushing past them unseen as they hurried about their lives.

This year, this time, she drifted from the little garden, and let the crowd draw her along in its early morning bustle. Snatches of conversation flowed over her head, and the baking heat of the pavement rose, restoring warmth and lightness to her body. She found herself moving towards a shop — too small to be described as a supermarket, more like a corner store. Piles of fruit and vegetables were heaped up on racks outside: oranges, lemons, hard, unripe peaches, apples of all sizes and colours, watery tomatoes, and cucumbers and onions sweating in the morning sun. All were out of season, grown under lights, kept on ice, and transported great distances to give the freshness and abundance of summer all year round.

And yet, she found she could not walk away. Those out-of-season fruits were nothing more than an attempt to replace the uncertainty of shifting seasons, and the careful balance of heat and rainfall with the steady reliability of a climate controlled by human hands. The least she could do was help them. And so she trailed her fingers along the racks of fruit, imbuing them with flavour, and sharp sweetness. She helped things along the way to ripeness, as she always had.

ϛ͵

Her descent this time felt different. She felt the usual pull downwards and inwards, the same rising cold and darkness, but instead of sweeping over the light and warmth she carried with her, it was as if her winter self rose to meet them, rather than chasing her sunlight self away. The two parts of her met, and merged, and danced. Laughing, she sprang forwards, and into her waiting husband's arms.

She waited for the moment when the crown of flowers she wore would wilt, for the twining ivy she had wrapped around her arms to wither and fall away, but it never came. Instead, the plants began to grow. The flowers tumbled uncontrollably down from her head, and the ivy burst in coils from her arms, tangling her against her husband, drawing them closer together. She could feel something stirring in the dead, grey earth — a rush of sap and seed and water familiar from her springtime sojourns, but so out of place here. Nevertheless, after a few moments, a tree was growing in the land of the dead — a cherry tree, laden unnaturally with both fruit and blossoms. It was as if the tree curved around to embrace the pair — he dark and solid, merging with the shadows, and she like a beam of sunshine piercing a wild garden.

Without quite knowing what she was doing, she reached up a hand to pluck one of the cherries from the tree, and pressed the red fruit into her husband's mouth. He accepted it in shock, his cold lips closing over that bright spark of life. Her hands traced threads of heat across his broad, cold back, and pink blossoms drifted, unheeded, from the tree as it continued to grow. This, too, was her realm, as much as the sunlit beds of flowers above.


End file.
